RPS Asks: What Is Your Virtual Talent?

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I suppose this question will largely be interpreted as “what game are you best at?” but I actually have a more specific motivation for asking. While I was probably best at Speedball 2 or Quake III in terms of raw twitchy gaminess, my best developed skill from a game was definitely fleet commanding in Eve Online. It was a skill within the overall mastery of the game. I wasn’t the best pilot, or the best trader, or the best diplomat or best at Eve in any general sense, I was just really good at fleet commanding and running gangs. I’m a little sad that this skill is now languishing after years of work.

Anyway, it made me wonder whether you lot had any specific talents you’d like to share? Perhaps, unlike John, you are a particularly good healer? Or are you a brilliant WoW auction house ninja? Or something else more exotic? The most interesting claims will win points in the subgame of RPS that I call “keeping Jim amused while this DLC downloads”.

Me too!
I mean, er, if there is not crafting then I will not stay with the game for long.
I don’t really consider myself a support player though -too much responsibility.
My favourite characters on City of Heroes are defenders and tanks which are sort of supporty, but you don’t really have to be the healer as a defender and can settle in a debuffer role.

Starcraft 2. But I’m still only around gold/platinum leagues. Even so it takes an enormous amount of learning and skill to even get to there by comparison to the vast majority of computer games out there.

same here, except I’m only borderline silver/gold. It’s amazing. I’ve dumped hundreds of hours into the game, no doubt, and by any average definition I’d say I’m really very good at playing the game of starcraft. But when it comes to the incredibly high skill ceiling that exists, I’m still a mediocre noob.

Along these lines, I’m quite a good qualifier in sim games. And though my race pace can unfortunately vary quite a lot over a full distance, I am quite good at maintaining reasonable pace on well worn tyres.

Tangent – friends and I one night, many moons ago, once set out to scientifically answer the question “Does alcohol make you a better driver?”. “Better driver” naturally being defined as lap times of Laguna Seca on Gran Turisimo.

Whilst it must be said that our methodology failed to account for the effect of repeated exposure to the test course, and our grasp of scientific principles somewhat faltered as the night progressed, we did manage to PROVE WITH SCIENCE that one and a half pints makes you a “better driver”.

It goes without saying that this is not an experiment that one would advise attempting around the suburbs, and relying upon our study in court after the police disentangle the cyclist, lollypop lady and half a bus stop from your radiator grill would be rather foolish.

Back when I was still racing iRacing, was doing some Week 13 racing on Laguna Seca. I had a bottle of scotch next to my wheel that I was swigging most times I went down the pit straight. For the first 2/3 of the bottle this netted some excellent results. I won some and was up the sharp end for all.

As I waited for another race, I finished that bottle. Amazingly, due to my good results in the preceding races, I was placed in quite a high split (where the fast guys race). That split happened to include a racing driver that I happen to be quite a large fan of (Shane van Gisbergen). I was absolutely stoked.

I also happen to be right next to him on the grid. So the race started and I was extremely cautious for the first lap, making completely sure not to smash in to him. Unfortunately at this point the alcohol had really set in and I was having a lot of trouble keeping focus. My pace was good enough to keep up, but I unfortunately crashed out not long in to the race. Blew my chance to race with someone I look up to somewhat :(

What I learned from this: Alcohol can be great, but if you drink too much it can bite you in the ass right when you don’t want it to.

I’m usually bad at driving. Give me anything from Flatout to Gran Tourismo and I’ll spend most of the game crashing into walls. But give me a vehicle not intended for greatness and task me with going, quite simply, from point A to point B … and prepare for all of hell to break loose and work itself into my tire treads.

It started with Battlefield 1942. It was the first driving game I ever played. I learned to drive by dodge tank blasts, weaving between mines, and driving tanks safely down cliffs. I wanted to get the drop on enemies and end up behind enemy lines. Towards the end of my BF 1942 career it started to get a bit supernatural–not that I got better, just that it got weird. I stopped being able to go between the two impossibly close trees I was aiming for, but fate would compensate by sending me between the other two trees that were too close together for the graphical mesh but somehow just far enough apart not to count as a collision. Or I’d drive over a well placed mine only to hear the car behind me explode. I also had an uncanny ability to store dynamite and mines ontop of tanks, jeeps and lorries that I never managed to repeat with planes despite my best efforts. As an engineer, I’d lug around explosives in the passenger seat, bounce my way around obstacles, and ditch right next to the tank that had been trying to shoot me unsuccessfully for the past 400 m of travel. Shortly thereafter, explosions. As such I was both overjoyed and somewhat put out when I discovered sticky-C4 in Battlefield 2.

My finest moments took place on Wake Island. Tapped on the south beach landing, our forces would be surrounded by mines, tanks and falling bombs. And I’d drive my way right out of that mess, only half-aware of exactly where I was going or how. Sometimes the passengers would still be there. Often they’d be shot or bail out, rightfully terrified that some stupid bastard was about to take them straight over a bunch of mines, or was heading straight at a tank, or was gunning a gap between buildings clearly too small for a jeep, or taking the jeep down a cliff. I wish I could have told them somehow, as it would have made many of my behind-the-lines missions much more fun and useful to have had more allies with me in my smoking-near-wreck of a vehicle. But it’s hard to convince someone with “Don’t worry, I have no idea what I’m doing but I’m pretty sure we’ll be fine.”

While the skill has dwindled somewhat, it once spread across most games not explicitly about cars. Most recently I experienced a complete synergy with the Mako. I could take it up almost any slope in the game. Or at least, I could take it up slopes that it was clearly not designed to go up, as I only managed by wiggling my way up polygon by polygon, squeaking out the last two feet of the slope at the Mako’s absolute minimum speed. I could make the thing do backflips. I was a road-kill generating machine. I was born to drive the Mako.

It’s still there, waiting for the right vehicle. Give me enough of a clunker, and a mundane enough task … and there’s no obstacle will stand between me and my destination. And no way in a million years we’ll be taking the straight path. Bring it on, Ice Cream Truck simulator. Bring it on.

For me it was the TF2 Heavy. With or without medic. I knew every healthpack ,exact what I could and couldn’t take, swapping between shotty and the basic heavy gun at the best moment. I reigned supreme even on the high-skill servers I frequented! I could basically “smell” spies about to backstab me and rare was the pyro who could out-circlestrafe me…
And even though I hadn’t played for over a year, a couple of months ago I played it again for a day, and after a couple of rounds they couldn’t take me from the top-spot again :) Granted that wasn’t the high-skill server, but it’s cool that I quickly get the feel and instincts back.

Best moment? A 21 kill spree, I basically placed myself behind the mine-cart in the first map with them and pushed it all the way up to the finish and I never died :) 15 minutes of glorious battle, people dying all around me, I never had a medic for long, and at times it was just me praying behind the cart trying to not get spotted until I killed them :)

I was quite an accomplished pistol sniper in Action Quake 2 – just at the LANs my friends and I used to run, not on public servers. But then I discovered bunny-hopping with the shotgun…

Never got in to Action Half-Life. It was like they took the simple, pure addictive goodness of AQ2 and cut it with all kinds of nonsense that diluted it. Then again, I never got into HL or any of the other mods (I never liked Counter-Strike, which could have something to do with it stealing all of my friends away from AQ2).

I did Action Half-Life, but pretty much exclusively teamplay. My talents were throwing knives / handcannon, always with the stealth slippers, and my favourite risky-but-worth-it tactic was to sneak up behind high-up snipers and jump-kick them out the window to their deaths. ;)

In a slightly similar vein, I now specialise in TF2 Heavy + fists + sneaking up on people and punching them to death before they realise what’s going on. It’s not nearly as effective as my AHL sneaky tactics were, but it’s still pretty darn fun.

I played on the PvP server for Asheron’s Call, and I always managed to be the gimpiest character for my level (as well as one of the slowest-levelling!) but my special skill was that while everyone in the world was trying to kill me (except the anti-PKs whom I love) I was suspiciously good at typing frantically while running for my life, trying with my silver tongue to make my enemy a friend before one of his lightning arcs landed.

It worked more often than you might think, and I had a long friends list full of otherwise ruthless killers who would sometimes come to my rescue because I was a funny little man.

(This is also where I gained my 100+ wpm typing speed — Mavis Beacon is less motivating than a guy with a crippling blow takuba).

Well shoot, I reply failed and now my comment is lost to the too-many-posts monster. Long story short, it’s not f2p afaik but they do still have regular updates and they made a way for all the old outdated quests to become relevant and fun to do again (tikola’s dagger, green mire cuirass, dungeon muddy, etc…).

Didn’t you know the only way to be uber is to start with the hitpoints of a small rabbit? =P (I’m guessing ignorance of that is what gimped you =P).

@akimbo I completely understand, any time I try and use a sniper rifle it’s like I’ve completely forgotten which end of the gun is dangerous.

But then somehow I’m the god-king of iron sights. I can score at least five headshots across the map in BC2 with the revolver before I have to reload, and assault rifles become precision weapons in my hands. It’s not even the scope on a sniper rifle that throws me off; I always, ALWAYS use an ACOG whenever I’m given the choice. I wish I understood how this works, but I’ve never been able to make sense of it.

im definetly in the manshoot area, thx to about 80 000 counterstrike player kills and quake 3. Its not that im that great an aimer, though im decent, i just have a knack for suckering players to stick their head out at the wrong moment.
Im also okay at just about any driving game, and pretty mediocre at RTS´

My jumping and running skills served me well in the twitch shooter years, to the extent that when I have the choice, I usually stick to building quick characters. First Deus Ex 3 augmentations I got were running and Jumping options, and I usually stick to thieves and their agile pals in the few proper PC RPGs I’ve attempted to get into.

That said, I simply can’t get my head around playing the Scout in TF2.

Also being extremely conservative with ammo and resources in all games, refusing to use any consumable items that improve resistance/strength/whatever because ‘I might need them later’. And then I reach the end of the game and I still have an inventory filled with those items.

I made it to the end of Amnesia with over 50 tinder boxes. Toughing it out in the dark was preferable to consuming those precious sources of light!

I did something similar when I saved up about 120 ammunition of the most powerful weapon for the final boss of Dead Space whilst playing on “impossible” difficulty (considering I beat it, the term is a little misleading). I crumpled that bastard in under 15, yet I still thought saving up that amount of ammo was a good idea.

Hey ! You have to be prepared for that boss fight AFTER the boss fight… So yeah basically I also carry around an ever-growing bunch of consumables until the game ends (or my inventory explodes).
You never know, right ?

i kinda have the same problem, although only if the item is in any way limited in supply. Obviously you can only find so many tinderboxes in Amnesia, so i never ever used those, but stimpaks in post-dead money new vegas are more plentiful than bottlecaps

I do this too. And similarly, it’ll be why my level 100 character will have 99 unspent skill points, or something. It’s also why I need to get the lowest symbol count in SpaceChem – it can be a painful affliction.

I too am extremely conservative in my use of limited resources in games. It definitely started at a young age with me: I can remember beating Super Mario Bros 3 with all three lines of power-up slots filled with leafs and fire flowers. The majority of my playthrough of Deus Ex, I had 30 bioelectric cells in my inventory. (Use my augs? are you crazy? I may need them at some point).

Although it might just be an innate trait, I’d like to think that this conservationist approach learned from video games is responsible for the pleasant state of my personal finances.

lol, I do the same =P it’s especially great in fantasy-ish RPGs, say Oblivion or somesuch…where I come across an unexpected enemy who smacks me for 60% of my health and then I say, “WAIT!!!”

time freezes while I pop open a cold frosty potion and drink it down…followed by another…another and still another. when time unfreezes I’m making suspicious sloshing noises, am at full health, have about six glowing auras competing for dominance around me, am invisible, resistant to all forms of damage, supernaturally strong, faster than a puma, and accompanied by a friendly ghost.

Haha, yes, I have the same trait/problem. Especially in games with crafting, I’ll never sell anything unless I know for a fact that it’s just “vendor trash”. I hate inventory size limits for this reason.

Weirdly, I kind of find myself doing it in real life as well. I have a bottle of my favorite-smelling soap, for instance, and I just kind of hoard it rather than, y’know, enjoying it and BUYING MORE. It’s very silly.

This probably isn’t what you were looking for, but a few years ago I was kind of adept in IRC trivia. Not so much the knowing of stuff (what they aren’t really about), but the fast processing, reaction and typing required. I used to say “the question has to go from your eyes directly into your fingers”

Give me an assault rifle at long range in a realistic-ish shooter like BF2 and you’ll be glad to have me on your team/sad to have me on the other team. Put me at close range though and I’ll just fruitlessly hammer all my rounds into whatever part of the target is most heavily armoured.

I agree with sniper, although perhaps not in terms of sheer marksmanship. I really like setting up ambushes, even if it means waiting for minutes before anyone even shows up. The one game I really excelled at was the original Flashpoint. You find a nice cosy bit of undergrowth or, even better, a corpse, lie over it and wait for someone to just stumble across your part of the island. It worked to a lesser extend on BF2’s Wake Island, but never really topped Flashpoint for me.

As a marginally sociable teenager I became quite adept at talking\feigning interest on the phone with one hand while playing Mortal Kombat 1 with the other. Thanks to the numeric keypad I could do combos, special moves, and fatalities one-handed with scary proficiency, even while multitasking.

Metonymy might be right, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. My best skill was easily guild/outfit/clan/corp leading (But not Fleet Command Jim, I left that to the aggressive players!). When I first started in Planetside at the age of 13 I was a poor leader, it was my way or the highway and the turnover rate was quite high.

Over the years and games though I actually learned how to lead, to mediate disputes and delegate tasks, how to give people both a vision of what we could be and an organized path on how to get there. I learned that jokes and a helping hand get you a lot further and caustic remarks (Although those are still fun on occasion) and how to get people to do things very much like work in their free time.

I think that’s really what I’ll take away from games if I ever stop playing, the skills I developed in virtual worlds has helped me quite a lot in this one.

Im a fairly good WoW raid leader.
Also ok at figuring out new mechanics (I was the first to figure out how Thunderfury’s threat generation in WoW vanilla worked, and had this be incorporated into various threat calculating ui modifications).

I’m would say i’m best at working out tactics for battles and manging small squads of people/ai/things, i’m hopeless at full RTS games due to not being able to micromanage or do the whole build up the base while attacking thing (captain turtle is my favorite way of playin them) but i tend to be good at identifing how people/AI go for the attack and suggesting how best to beat them.

Basically i suck at starcraft but was good at world in conflict.

unfortantly in games where i am good at this the playerbase is best described as “lively” (read, bunch of twats) so if you suggest a tactic other than “run in and hit things/blow things up/shoot things” you get scorned and kicked so don’t get much chance

Other games i’m good at due to this is the advance wars series, but that might e becasue whenever i play my mates at it the they have never played before so i end up just steamrolling them as they go “ohh big tank, much get that”

My twitch skills are mediocre at best but I do class myself as an above avarage redstone wizard in minecraft. My fully automatic piston driven minecart station with self balancing cross-station minecart storage was quite impressive even if I say so myself.

That was always fun. Setting an enemy base to neutral, planting explosives on all the vehicles and ditching before the latest batch of spawns turns around to retake the point was a fun way to give the front-liners time to get to my position. :)

I’m not brilliant at it compared to other players, but I’m a lot better at traps and ambushes than I am at most other gaming pursuits. Mostly because I have a very good internal clock. Without looking at the stopwatch, I know how much better/worse I did on a Trackmania map/lap down to .5 second precision (admittedly less than useful in Trackmania where it’s the .05 that wins you the race … and since there’s a clock at the bottom of the screen :P). Outside of gaming, if I ask myself how much time has passed since the last time I looked at a clock (and if I have been distracted as opposed to specifically counting down minutes/seconds) I can usually get within 30 seconds of how long it’s been out to around an hour of passed time. If I can figure out which route a player is going to take, I can usually time their doom without watching. It helps for killing cloaked spies on 2Fort as well, catching them as they try to stalk across the bridge after giving themselves away on the battlements.

I was one hell of a Sniper/shotgun wielder in Halo2(42 kills 1 death was my best). Considering it was controlled with a .. controller I’m pretty proud of that. I will never put that much time into a controller based shooter ever again.

I had a talent for treachery in Eve Online but i started to think i was a bad person so stopped playing as that was really the only draw for me. I consider myself talented as i could afford anything i wanted and had three accounts i payed for with plex.

When I had the time and patience to singularly focus on a game I was in top clans in shooter games and top guilds in WoW. I’ve always been very quick at figuring out how games work and what is the best way to excel at them coupled with good hand-eye coordination.

These days I don’t have the energy to get stuck in a single game (he said unknowingly six months before Diablo 3) for a long time.When I played UT/Battlefield/WoW I missed so many good games because I had no time to play anything else. So now I am playing more and more single player games avoiding some of the multiplayer traps, seeing as how I have a slightly compulsive personality.

I played WoW for the first 2 and a bit years that it was around and my main was a warlock. Due to guilds chopping and changing, I ended up comparably under-geared in a high-end guild and got in one of their Naxx raids. I absolutely shined on Patchwerk (just pure dps over an extended time), only coming behind a super-geared mage and rogue on the dps tables. I had his abilities down to an art form.

I used to be a walking encyclopedia about City of Heroes back when I played it, knowing pretty much everything there was to know about both the mechanics and content. I was still not all that great at actually playing it though.

Apart for that, I’ve not really developed any special talents with a game that I can think of.

Hmm, probably blowing myself up in online FPS’s. Can’t seem to get the hang of throwing a grenade without it rebounding off something to land at my feet. The amount of times I’ve been autokicked from servers for fratricide is too numerous to count.

Demon’s Souls taught me, and Dark Souls is currently reinforcing, that I’m almost pathologically persistent even in the face of multiple failures, and no real idea what I’m doing wrong. And also that I’m a masochist. That’s a talent. Who says it’s not.

I was good at making 40 cents stretch a long way on an arcade machine. Only choose games that reward skill with long playtime. Never continue. Then practice practice practice. Silkworm was my favorite, I played the Jeep, my friend flew the Helicopter.

I was a decent healer and bossy enough to lead instances back in the day.

In multiplayer I specialise in drowning the enemy in my corpses. I always lead kamikaze attacks, ninjaing towers in Alterac, leading groups of enemies away from the frontlines, crashing helicopters into fortified guard towers. At LANs the higher my deathcount the more my team wins.